While riding my university shuttle, I used to stare at women’s hair. They were mostly young white women like me, who would sit in rows facing each other at the front of the bus, compulsively checking their phones. I would ride to campus in the afternoons and just gaze, marveling at how well-coiffed they were, all of them with the same long, straightened, voluminous hair—the hair that sets the standard for all other hair. The rows of hair would be so perfect and shiny and smooth—not a single strand out of place, no flyaway or split ends—that I could stare into them as if they were one luminous mass, like volcanic glass.
I come from a line of perfect women: perfectly dressed, cordial, well spoken. An unbroken line of scheduling and doing and achieving. I remember my mother telling me, more than once, that the only thing that matters is that I be an intelligent, educated woman. I was squandering my potential if I was anything less. And that would be a shame, she said.
As a little girl, I remember watching her at her vanity, doing her hair. She would take an impossibly long time to get ready each morning: daubing on makeup out of shiny containers, plucking earrings off her jewelry stand—and curling her hair. As a young mother in the ’90s, she had a chin-length bob and bangs that she styled precisely at the end of her morning routine using a prickly curling brush, which looked like a plant from a Dr. Seuss book. Hair, to me, was the crowning glory. It’s the last thing you fix and put into place before you walk out the door, the thing that signifies that you’re really together.
My mother has never shown up underprepared in her life. She is a doctorate-holding professor, an only child, the first in her family to go to college. When I think of her as a mother, I picture the perfect calendar she kept for my brother and me as children: the times of our gymnastics classes and choir practices and basketball games all penned neatly into the squares, with dentist and doctors’ appointment cards taped in columns down the sides. Her mother was the same way.
I’ve never known how to live up to my maternal line, though I’ve burned up a lot of energy trying. Womanhood to me is the feeling of always striving. Striving even when there is no endpoint. I learned early on that to be a good woman—a strong woman—means scheduling, doing, achieving. You execute this series flawlessly and without any complaints. You survive in this world by showing up, pretty and prepared and perfect, hopefully more articulate than anyone else in the room—and always with done hair.
In the chapter of The Second Sex where Simone de Beauvoir makes her famous pronouncement that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, she further argues an essential part of this “becoming” involves practicing womanhood through an alter ego: a doll. De Beauvoir describes how it represents the female body, a passive object to be coddled:
Naturally, the most famous example of this is Barbie. Ann duCille, who writes extensively about black Barbie in her 1996 book Skin Trade, recalls in the book her experiences researching: poking around in the aisles of Toys “R” Us looking for the latest black Barbie doll. In the book, she includes an impromptu interview she had with a black teenage girl, who confessed to duCille “in graphic detail” the many Barbie “murders and mutilations” she had committed over the years. “It’s the hair! It’s the hair!” the girl told duCille. “The hair, that hair; I want it. I want it!”
I come from a line of perfect women: perfectly dressed, cordial, well spoken. An unbroken line of scheduling and doing and achieving. I remember my mother telling me, more than once, that the only thing that matters is that I be an intelligent, educated woman. I was squandering my potential if I was anything less. And that would be a shame, she said.As a little girl, I remember watching her at her vanity, doing her hair. She would take an impossibly long time to get ready each morning: daubing on makeup out of shiny containers, plucking earrings off her jewelry stand—and curling her hair. As a young mother in the ’90s, she had a chin-length bob and bangs that she styled precisely at the end of her morning routine using a prickly curling brush, which looked like a plant from a Dr. Seuss book. Hair, to me, was the crowning glory. It’s the last thing you fix and put into place before you walk out the door, the thing that signifies that you’re really together.
My mother has never shown up underprepared in her life. She is a doctorate-holding professor, an only child, the first in her family to go to college. When I think of her as a mother, I picture the perfect calendar she kept for my brother and me as children: the times of our gymnastics classes and choir practices and basketball games all penned neatly into the squares, with dentist and doctors’ appointment cards taped in columns down the sides. Her mother was the same way.
I’ve never known how to live up to my maternal line, though I’ve burned up a lot of energy trying. Womanhood to me is the feeling of always striving. Striving even when there is no endpoint. I learned early on that to be a good woman—a strong woman—means scheduling, doing, achieving. You execute this series flawlessly and without any complaints. You survive in this world by showing up, pretty and prepared and perfect, hopefully more articulate than anyone else in the room—and always with done hair.
In the chapter of The Second Sex where Simone de Beauvoir makes her famous pronouncement that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, she further argues an essential part of this “becoming” involves practicing womanhood through an alter ego: a doll. De Beauvoir describes how it represents the female body, a passive object to be coddled:
The little girl coddles her doll and dresses her up as she dreams of being coddled and dressed up herself; inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvelous doll… she soon learns that in order to be pleasing she must be “pretty as a picture”… she puts on fancy clothes, she studies herself in a mirror, she compares herself with princesses and fairies.Feminists have often identified hair grooming as the first lesson in gender socialization. Dolls are perfectly designed to aid girls in learning submission, letting them play-act the labor that will later be expected of them when it comes to appearances.
Naturally, the most famous example of this is Barbie. Ann duCille, who writes extensively about black Barbie in her 1996 book Skin Trade, recalls in the book her experiences researching: poking around in the aisles of Toys “R” Us looking for the latest black Barbie doll. In the book, she includes an impromptu interview she had with a black teenage girl, who confessed to duCille “in graphic detail” the many Barbie “murders and mutilations” she had committed over the years. “It’s the hair! It’s the hair!” the girl told duCille. “The hair, that hair; I want it. I want it!”
